Fani Willis Survives the Effort to Disqualify Her

In mid-February, in Atlanta, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee held an evidentiary hearing that drew an unusually high number of viewers to his courtroom’s livestream channel. The hearing was aimed at clarifying some aspects of the relationship between Fani Willis, district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, and her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. In late 2021, Willis hired Wade to work on her career case: the RICH prosecution of Donald Trump and eighteen others for their alleged attempt to interfere with the Georgia vote count in the 2020 presidential election. Wade had no experience in RICH prosecutions and had worked primarily on misdemeanor charges, which caused some veterans of Atlanta’s legal community to question his hiring: “It was strange,” one of those attorneys told me. “We’ve never heard of this guy.”

Some lawyers representing Trump’s co-defendants decided to investigate and soon learned that Wade and Willis were romantically involved. An attorney, Ashleigh Merchant, presented her findings in January: Willis and Wade had traveled to places like Napa Valley and Aruba, allegedly on Wade’s money. Receipts later confirmed that Wade had paid for his flights and hotels. The trader’s presentation argued that the intimate relationship between Willis and Wade, which the couple eventually acknowledged, claiming it had begun in early 2022, after Wade was hired, was inappropriate: They had “benefits.”[ed] personally of this prosecution at the expense of Fulton County,” she wrote, and therefore should be disqualified from prosecuting the Trump case.

The February hearing had a lewd tone when it came to sex and money. A former friend and colleague of Willis claimed that she had seen Willis and Wade kiss in 2019, claiming that was when their relationship had really begun. (This former friend also acknowledged that she had resigned from her position in the district attorney’s office under Willis, anticipating that she would be fired for inadequate performance.) Wade and Willis denied this. As for the money: Wade earned more than seven hundred thousand dollars while working for Willis, and Merchant alleged that some of those funds had returned to sender during their vacation together. Wade stepped away from the stand. “If you have ever spent any time with Mrs. Willis, you know that she is a very independent and proud woman,” she said. “So she’s going to insist that she carry her own weight.” Willis paid for her share of her trip in cash, she said. Willis’ father confirmed that her daughter usually kept large amounts of cash when it was her turn to testify. “Most black people hide cash or save it,” she said.

Then Willis, in a surprise move, entered the courtroom and sat on the witness stand. He remained there for two hours, defending himself against accusations of wrongdoing and suggesting that his opponents were lying. She insisted that she had paid for approximately her share of the trips she took with Wade, always in cash to do so. “You’re confused,” she told Merchant at one point when she went semi-viral. “You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I am not on trial. No matter how much you try to take me to court.”

In the weeks after the hearing, CNN reported that Willis had paid four hundred dollars in cash while visiting a Napa winery with Wade (a winery employee recalled the unusual transaction), lending credence to how she and Wade said they had paid their bills. travel together. . Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers produced cell phone data showing Wade’s phone was near Willis’s condo late at night and early in the morning on about three dozen occasions before the couple said that their relationship began. Willis has questioned the implications of the data, which some experts say is inconclusive anyway. Trump’s lawyers have suggested, pointing to this data, that the district attorney and her prosecutor committed perjury in their testimony about the timeline of their relationship, another reason for disqualification.

In other words, Judge McAfee had a lot to consider when weighing the attempt to disqualify Willis from the Trump case, including his own future. Appointed by Governor Brian Kemp in 2023, at the age of thirty-three, McAfee will run for his first election in May and faces some competition from a civil rights attorney and radio host who recently ran for president. . ring. Lawyers who have known McAfee since his days as a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office mostly doubted that this would affect his decision-making. In a recent interview on a local Atlanta radio station, McAfee himself rejected the idea that politics plays a role. “There’s a lot I have to go through,” he said. “And so I had, and again I will emphasize this, I had a draft of an outline before I heard the rumor that someone wanted to run for this position. So the result is not going to change because of politics.”

I spent a few hours with McAfee myself, in late 2022 and early 2023, before he became a judge. I was reporting a story about a prisoner who had stolen millions from billionaires while serving time in Georgia prisons. McAfee had helped prosecute the man. During our conversations, I found him unusually good-humored, even-tempered, and wise for his age. I remember mentioning some news about Kanye West, which I had just read on Twitter, when I walked into his office one day. “Don’t waste your time on that,” he told me. Instead, he suggested, he should read Robert Caro’s books on Lyndon Johnson: there was an author obsessed with getting the subject right and works that would stand the test of time.

On Friday, Judge McAfee issued an eloquent and exhaustive twenty-three-page ruling that seemed to seek (and perhaps find) a middle path. While he saw no “real conflict of interest” in the relationship between Willis and Wade, the judge made clear that “a significant appearance of impropriety” and “a whiff of lies” remains. He noted Willis’s “tremendous error in judgment” in pursuing a relationship with his lead prosecutor in such a high-profile case, engaging in the “regular and flexible exchange of money” between the two and, on several occasions in weeks recently, by publicly commenting on the allegations. But, he wrote, these failures were up to voters and “other forums” to fix. Although “dismissal of the indictment is not the appropriate remedy,” McAfee ruled, Willis can only remain on the case without Wade.

I reached out to some attorneys who have known both McAfee and Willis for years. One of them was Bruce Harvey, a legendary local criminal defense attorney who had told me, in February, that the whole Willis-Wade affair was “much ado about nothing.” Now, he said, “smells have a stronger power of persuasion than words.” He continued: “The smell that now hangs over this case will remain with it forever.” Another longtime local defense attorney, who wished to remain anonymous, described McAfee’s decision to me as “very thoughtful and learned.” But he wondered “if Fulton County voters are as forgiving of his behavior as the judge has been.” (Willis is running for re-election this year.) “Maybe what the community wants is to reach an agreement,” he continued. “Or maybe no one will be satisfied with splitting the baby.” He also announced that the decision will be appealed. In any case, it is now highly unlikely that a trial will begin before the November elections.

Nora Benavidez, a civil rights attorney in Atlanta, hoped McAfee would not disqualify Willis. She now urged the court, and the world, to leave behind this “distraction from the accusations of electoral subversion facing Trump and his allies.” And she continued: “The case is enormously important as our democracy lurches toward an election in which Mr. Trump is a candidate. He can and should go to trial now so that the public and the jury can make their own decisions.” Shortly after the ruling was released on Friday, Trump sent a fundraising email calling the Georgia case a “witch hunt.” ♦